Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Career women cannot 'have it all'

Good article that points out how difficult it is for a career woman to have a family too, and how its unwise for women to put off having children beyond 35. However, I think it misses out on several points:

(1) Its not just harder for women over 35 to naturally conceive a healthy child, its also the case that they will have less energy to spend with a young child.

(2) Its the very existance of career women that has driven the increasing cost of living in Western countries. Double the size of the workforce and employers can offer less pay to their workers, plus people selling houses and the like can push prices right up as there are now 'duel-income' couples wanting to buy them.

(3) Many people, including myself, see it as morally and socially 'problematic'/questionable to have a baby, then palm it off on a childcarer for 90% of the time.

(4) Having a baby in early 20s is probably not so hard for a women as the author makes out. For example, most career/business-people spend their 20s just treading water/marking time within an organisation before building up enough experience to get seriously promoted in their 30s. Not all ambitious people in their 20s work extremely long hours. A case in point is the fact that many young women go on a 'gap year' of travel after university. If they can find the time to take a whole year out, bumming around Thailand, why can't they find the time to have a baby in their 20s? If women had a baby between 19 and 25 (for example), then by the time they were in their 30s, and ready for proper promotion and larger work responsibilities, then the child would be of school age and the pressure would be off a little in terms of time and energy needed to care for them. I suspect the REAL source of why young women don't want babies at a young age is so they can fit in another decade of partying and sleeping around before they settle down to the responsibility of childcare. Men are always talked about as being the feckless and irresponsible ones, but many young women are too.

Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."

PubMed, which indexes the 3,000 leading medical journals, from the 1950s to present, contains 42 articles on women’s health for every one on men’s health.